Seanfram Manor

I

Astatine noticed the blue sand in the hourglass running out completely. Hesitantly, she turned it over so the count would restart, it had been flipped three times already as the darkness grew paler and paler, eyelids of steel, impatient to just pass out and let the candle burn out, fingers as feathers twiddling the quill, the translation of the complete works of Virgil should not be the task of one person, not with the abundance of trained translators and speech experts in the manor, different voices within a same text would create dissonance and strip the word of its purity, the lost interpretations which neglect the One, possible but never tried, every book on her shelf was the effort of a single mind, everything is One and not Two, the sum and not the parts, but that was not her problem, she awaited a second commissioner since she heard it being considered by the Lord, and why could she not be aided in the creative process, whenever Deleuze and Guattari wrote together they were recognized as one author, why was it she had to adapt it all on her own, did the Lord care to hear her voice through Virgil's words, are not all translators overshadowed when revitalizing the classics, that was it, as soon as she wrote Aeneas' name one last time she would go to her sleep chamber, the sand shall run out for its own sake, the candle shall burn for its own light, going out, gone out, she slammed her quill on the table, making the inkwell tremble over the original copy of Complete Works, translated from Latin to English by her mentor, a sage elder, she stood up from her desk and looked out the window, the extension of the land.

The demesne below stood still and no villein was awake. From the tower wherein was her office, the window did not offer a far horizon. Farther than the manor's lower walls, a green patch lay visible, fields of who knew what, and even farther the view no longer painted a clear picture, but it was known, repeated ad populum and substantiated by the local cartographer that farther was the palace of King Osorio, ruler of Deneb, the kingdom of topaz. The centralized power was set instead at the Western edge of the kingdom, as if Deneb were a giant hexagon and the palace was located on the second vertex to the left. The manor was not part of that territory, in fact, it was debated among historians whether the manor could count as a dependent territory, three generations had come and gone since the last time anyone heard from King Gorin, apparently Queen Elysa did not succeed, their daughters Gloria and Victoria had run away to never be seen again, it was as if the monarchy of Alamor had simply vanished, leaving everything else in its place. With no news of the Southern Kingdom, the latest edition of Historia Analytica of the Past Three Millennia did not give an account of their disappearance and the entry for Alamor had not been expanded, any major events that happened there were since registered under different sections, the scholarlies excused this, no more messages from the people who spoke quenya and sindarin, in the books the kingdom of Alamor was alive but silent, the cartographer drew the Castle of the High Water Lilies in the same spot, who knew if it still stood, there was no way to know, no traveler came from the South, and rumor had it that travelers who headed south never returned.

The last thing Astatine thought about before going to bed was the memory of her daughter Manga marching towards Deneb, the kingdom of topaz, she could see her shadow walking those steps again, this time from her tower, a young woman with aspirations of becoming an architect for King Osorio, she thought about how she missed her visions through spell correspondence, how proud she made her, how long it had been since she had parted south, and how she wished, wished, that the rumor were not true.